Herbert Wells - Marriage

Once or twice that had seemed to happen, and then it had come to nothing....

She knew that sooner or later this completion of his possibilities must come, that the present steadfastness of purpose was a phase in which forces gathered, that love must sweep into his life as a deep and passionate disturbance. She wondered where it would take him, whether it would leave him enriched or devastated. She saw at times how young he was; she had, as I suppose most older people have about their juniors, the profoundest doubt whether he was wise enough yet to be trusted with a thing so good as himself. He had flashes of high-spirited indiscretion, and at times a wildfire of humour flared in his talk. So far that had done no worse for him than make an enemy or so in scientific circles. But she had no idea of the limits of his excitability. She would watch him and fear for him—she knew the wreckage love can make—and also she desired that he should lose nothing that life and his nature could give him.

In the two months of separation that ensued before Marjorie was one-and-twenty, Trafford's mind went through some remarkable phases. At first the excitement of his passion for Marjorie obscured everything else, then with his return to London and his laboratory the immense inertia of habit and slowly developed purposes, the complex yet convergent system of ideas and problems to which so much of his life had been given, began to reassert itself. His love was vivid and intense, a light in his imagination, a fever in his blood; but it was a new thing; it had not crept into the flesh and bones of his being, it was away there in Surrey; the streets of London, his home, the white-walled chamber with its skylight and high windows and charts of constants, in which his apparatus was arranged, had no suggestion of her. She was outside—an adventure—a perplexing incommensurable with all these things.

He had left Buryhamstreet with Marjorie riotously in possession of his mind. He could think of nothing but Marjorie in the train, and how she had shone at him in the study, and how her voice had sounded when she spoke, and how she stood and moved, and the shape and sensation of her hands, and how it had felt to hold her for those brief moments in the wood and press lips and body to his, and how her face had gleamed in the laced shadows of the moonlight, soft and wonderful.

In fact, he thought of Marjorie.

He thought she was splendid, courageous, wise by instinct. He had no doubt of her or that she was to be his—when the weeks of waiting had passed by. She was his, and he was Marjorie's; that had been settled from the beginning of the world. It didn't occur to him that anything had happened to alter his life or any of his arrangements in any way, except that they were altogether altered—as the world is altered without displacement when the sun pours up in the east. He was glorified—and everything was glorified.

He wondered how they would meet again, and dreamt a thousand impossible and stirring dreams, but he dreamt them as dreams.

At first, to Durgan's infinite distress, he thought of her all day, and then, as the old familiar interests grappled him again, he thought of her in the morning and the evening and as he walked between his home and the laboratory and at all sorts of incidental times—and even when the close-locked riddles of his research held the foreground and focus of his thoughts, he still seemed to be thinking of her as a radiant background to ions and molecules and atoms and interwoven systems of eddies and quivering oscillations deep down in the very heart of matter.

And always he thought of her as something of the summer. The rich decays of autumn came, the Chelsea roads were littered with variegated leaves that were presently wet and dirty and slippery, the twilight crept down into the day towards five o'clock and four, but in his memory of her the leaves were green, the evenings were long, the warm quiet of rural Surrey in high August filled the air. So that it was with a kind of amazement he found her in London and in November close at hand. He was called to the college telephone one day from a conversation with a proposed research student. It was a middle-aged woman bachelor anxious for the D.Sc., who wished to occupy the further bench in the laboratory; but she had no mental fire, and his mind was busy with excuses and discouragements.

He had no thought of Marjorie when she answered, and for an instant he did not recognize her voice.

"Yes, I'm Mr. Trafford."...

"Who is it?" he reiterated with a note of irascibility. " Who? "

The little voice laughed. "Why! I'm Marjorie!" it said.

Then she was back in his life like a lantern suddenly become visible in a wood at midnight.

It was like meeting her as a china figure, neat and perfect and two inches high. It was her voice, very clear and very bright, and quite characteristic, as though he was hearing it through the wrong end of a telescope. It was her voice, clear as a bell; confident without a shadow.

"It's me! Marjorie! I'm twenty-one to-day!"

It was like a little arrow of exquisite light shot into the very heart of his life.

He laughed back. "Are you for meeting me then, Marjorie?"

They met in Kensington Gardens with an air of being clandestine and defiant. It was one of those days of amber sunlight, soft air, and tender beauty with which London relieves the tragic glooms of the year's decline. There were still a residue of warm-tinted leaves in puffs and clusters upon the tree branches, a boat or two ruffled the blue Serpentine, and the waterfowl gave colour and animation to the selvage of the water. The sedges were still a greenish yellow.

The two met shyly. They were both a little unfamiliar to each other. Trafford was black-coated, silk-hatted, umbrella-d, a decorous young professor in the place of the cheerful aeronaut who had fallen so gaily out of the sky. Marjorie had a new tailor-made dress of russet-green, and a little cloth toque ruled and disciplined the hair he had known as a ruddy confusion.... They had dreamt, I think, of extended arms and a wild rush to embrace one another. Instead, they shook hands.

"And so," said Trafford, "we meet again!"

"I don't see why we shouldn't meet!" said Marjorie.

There was a slight pause.

"Let's have two of those jolly little green chairs," said Trafford....

They walked across the grass towards the chairs he had indicated, and both were full of the momentous things they were finding it impossible to say.

"There ought to be squirrels here, as there are in New York," he said at last.

They sat down. There was a moment's silence, and then Trafford's spirit rose in rebellion and he plunged at this—this stranger beside him.

"Look here," he said, "do you still love me, Marjorie?"

She looked up into his face with eyes in which surprise and scrutiny passed into something altogether beautiful. "I love you—altogether," she said in a steady, low voice.

And suddenly she was no longer a stranger, but the girl who had flitted to his arms breathless, unhesitating, through the dusk. His blood quickened. He made an awkward gesture as though he arrested an impulse to touch her. "My sweetheart," he said. "My dear one!"

Marjorie's face flashed responses. "It's you," he said.

"Me," she answered.

"Do you remember?"

"Everything!"

"My dear!"

"I want to tell you things," said Marjorie. "What are we to do?"....

He tried afterwards to retrace that conversation. He was chiefly ashamed of his scientific preoccupations during that London interval. He had thought of a thousand things; Marjorie had thought of nothing else but love and him. Her happy assurance, her absolute confidence that his desires would march with hers, reproached and confuted every adverse thought in him as though it was a treachery to love. He had that sense which I suppose comes at times to every man, of entire unworthiness for the straight, unhesitating decision, the clear simplicity of a woman's passion. He had dreamt vaguely, unsubstantially, the while he had arranged his pressures and temperatures and infinitesimal ingredients, and worked with goniometer and trial models and the new calculating machine he had contrived for his research. But she had thought clearly, definitely, fully—of nothing but coming to him. She had thought out everything that bore upon that; reasons for preciptance, reasons for delay, she had weighed the rewards of conformity against the glamour of romance. It became more and more clear to him as they talked, that she was determined to elope with him, to go to Italy, and there have an extraordinarily picturesque and beautiful time. Her definiteness shamed his poverty of anticipation. Her enthusiasm carried him with her. Of course it was so that things must be done....